Protecting intellectual property is of enormous importance in today's highly technical world economy. Membership of countries into the World Trade Organization often depends on how well those countries recognize and enforce intellectual property rights of intellectual property holders. Everyday there is news of two large companies disputing each others property rights in our courts. Additionally, the United States Patent and Trademark Organization (PTO) is grappling with huge patent backlogs as patent filings continue to rise at a staggering pace.
It is therefore not surprising that enterprises utilize a substantial amount of time and resources in developing and protecting their intellectual property assets. This is done with the expectation that the enterprises can gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. The large investment and work done by enterprises are the primary reasons why the governments, courts, and government agencies are becoming overwhelmed with work related to protecting, adjudicating, and evaluating intellectual property.
The most desirable form or intellectual property that an enterprise can hold is a patent. With a patent, an enterprise can exclude others from making, using, importing, and selling their prescribed invention. The claims of enterprise's patent define the metes and bounds of what an enterprise can legitimately lay claim to.
Yet, obtaining patent protection is expensive and time consuming; therefore, it is in the best interest of the patentee, PTO, and the marketplace as a whole that any existing publications (sources) related to what the patentee seeks to patent are found and evaluated during the patent process. There are a plethora of sources in a multitude of languages that can be potentially evaluated.
It is impractical and unrealistic to believe that even the surface can be scratched for purposes of determining what publications are available for proper evaluation. A patentee or an examiner could spend a year or more parsing through sources and still may not find something that was relevant. Thus, it is not surprising that sources related to a patent can turn up in litigation years later when those sources were never found when the patent was initially evaluated.
In fact, it is a huge challenge to locate relevant sources related to claims of a patent or a pending patent application. One hurdle has been addressed and that is making most sources available in electronic format and accessible via the World-Wide Web (WWW) and Internet; although to a large extent this is still an ongoing process.
Thus, improved and automated techniques are needed for evaluating the impact of patents and their claims in view of available electronic sources of information.